I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer
“Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which recognizes the truths of individualism and collectivism.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
In this second part of Reverence vs The Machine, I want to explore more deeply the friction that occurs in society between The Individual and The Collective when society no longer has prescribed limits that we are expected to live within; when we have renounced our inborn knowledge of morality, what C. S. Lewis called ‘The Law of Human Nature’ (or what St. Thomas called ‘synderesis’ - knowledge of the universal principles of moral action); when we no longer have unity, interbeing, conviviality and solidarity.
To be whole we must have the strength of each individual held by the collective and guided by innate moral structure.
I have read so many wonderful and interesting articles lately that offer insight into this idea; we will explore some of them below.
A note: I have heard several people say recently that using the word ‘God’ is problematic (there is a negative connotation associated with it in the West - home of the “well-educated”, secular, logical, left-brain-dominant class) and we should instead use words like ‘Source’ or ‘Creator’, but I will continue to use the word God (as now my Rebel archetype won’t allow anything else).
The Cult of the Individual
“Our society’s core myth is that of Progress, and that myth both stems from and leads to the oldest desire of all: to become gods ourselves, and to remake the world in our image.” - Paul Kingsnorth, God in the Iron Age
Emile Durkheim wrote, in the early 1900’s, about the shift away from religion in Western societies. He believed we did not become secular, but shifted from believing in God as sacred to The Individual as sacred - The Cult of the Individual. He placed science (or rather scientism) at the core of this new religion and felt that traditional religions could co-exist in society, but would have to defer to this new cult if there was a conflict. The Cult of the Individual, he felt, should now hold authority over the ‘archaic’ beliefs of the great world religions.
Well, this seems to be where we have descended to.
One’s Own Ego and Desires
“The Babelians woke up one day to find themselves speaking different languages—a metaphor for a breakdown in communication, consensus, and comity.” - Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity
I read a recent article on What We Need Now where Fr. Stavinskas wrote about The Infidelity of the Future:
G. K. Chesterton, in his inimitable fashion, put it succinctly: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything.” Or, Dostoyevsky, credited with declaring: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on the day before his election as Sovereign Pontiff, warned of the emergence of “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
“A dictatorship of relativeism” is a very appropriate description of what is going on today. This is the state of nothingness, the void , I wrote about in the previous article. When all is relative we descend into chaos, back to the Tower of Babel, a world without a framework to hold us together.
N.S. Lyons, in his essay The Change Merchants, points out that the rejection of ‘permanent fixed truths’ in the West (e.g. C.S. Lewis’ Law of Human Nature and St. Thomas’ synderesis) has created the opportunity for constant change - the relentless shifting from one crisis to another, from one virtual signal to the next, from one fad to the the next fad….all necessary to feed the Machine:
Today, almost every sector of the postindustrial economy operates with a similar incentive structure. Fast culture is good business for the same reason as is fast fashion. Just as promoting hedonism and conspicuous consumption can stoke demand, so a strong incentive exists to promote a whole suite of values that encourage sustained and faster change. Values that scramble sensibilities, obliterate old borders, uproot ties that bind, eliminate the limits of old obligations, pry open and plunder distinct and exclusive communities and cultures; or that discover new rights, or temporarily establish fashionable new moral norms that suddenly compel conformity; or that launch grand moral crusades—all create new demand for services that otherwise wouldn’t exist. “Progress” is profitable….
By contrast, the prospect of deaccelerated change—or, worse, the notion offered by conservative traditionalists that there exist permanent truths, a fixed human nature, or inherited ways of life that have already provided best-fit solutions to intractable human challenges—is, in a real sense, an existential threat. Like the shark who must keep swimming constantly in order to breathe, the Change Merchant finds that stability means death…
“Woke” and other variants of postmodernism identify language and narrative as the central domain of human struggle and control of it as the essence of power. Indeed, with his subjectivist rejection of any objective truth, the postmodernist sees narrative as reality. And if narrative—or abstract theory—is “truth,” then it is observable material reality that must be false, amenable to change by sheer will.
This, we might note, is the ideal ideological worldview to tempt Foxes and Change Merchants. It is fundamentally dematerializing, relocating power from the physical world to their preferred realm of pure abstraction and narrative—i.e., it promises complete power to manipulate reality with the mind. This infinite subjectivism provides the opportunity to induce unlimited, frictionless change, at any scale, at any time; even those material limits once considered absolute, such as biology, can be cast aside with a word. The world becomes completely fluid, with reality structured by interpretation, necessitating the management and control of a priestly expert class. How convenient!
…The historical cycle that Pareto observed suggests that, one way or another, our era of hyper-rapid change won’t last forever. A limit exists to how much change and instability most people can tolerate in a short span of time. At some point, they might just collectively stop buying it, and we can all enjoy the respite of a long-overdue change recession. First, however, the frustrations of many more people will have to grow to the point where they learn to reject the Change Merchants’ advertised wares—remembering, perhaps, that good ideas (and principles) don’t need to be replaced as quickly as refrigerators. In fact, the longer such concepts have endured, the better they probably are.
Hear, hear!
The creation of arbitrary values ‘promises complete power to manipulate reality with the mind’ allowing us to remove any limits or eternal truths that hold cultures together and create stability. With all boundaries removed and perpetual change afoot nothing is sacrosanct. This leaves us with constant turmoil and internal agitation….chaos.
“Consume, dispose, repeat is the order of the day.”
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.” - Ivan Illach
L.M. Sacasas writing as The Convivial Society wrote in his recent essay Ill With Want that “one might even make the case that the chief product of a consumer economy is manufactured desire or discontent.” Sacasas is invoking the philosophy of Ivan Illach in this article. Illach believed, in a consumer society we work towards creating machines, tools, technology and goods/commodities to do the work for us, but inadvertantly create a society where we are then slaves to those things as they usurpe our abilities - the machines/tools/goods enslave us, we do not enslave them:
Illich understood what I think most of us are unwilling to accept. Endless wanting will wreck us and also the world that is our home. By contrast, our economic order and the ostensible health of our society is premised on the generation of insatiable desires, chiefly for consumer goods and services. Your contentment and mine would wreak havoc on the existing order of things. “That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a radical sentiment. Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained given how things presently operate. So just about every aspect of our culture is designed to make us think that happiness, or something like it, always lies on the other side of more.
Our desire for constant consumption, our ‘want’, pushes us further and further away from the need to engage in Community, where our needs are met by those around us, towards The Cult of the Individual where we can purchase what we want/need to the detriment of The Convivial Society.
Paul Kingsnorth in his essay Want is the Acid put it this way:
What I am really trying to get at here is not a theory or a structure or an ideological claim, but something deeper: an old, surging force, one that stems from within us. A force which has driven all this onwards, which is the lifeblood of the Machine, and which, through its untrammelling, acts as an acid which burns through all past structures and values. An acid which is now acting to dissolve our ecosystems and cultural forms, as it has dissolved so much else.
What is this force? What could be so powerful that it could dissolve away centuries of our cultural inheritance; could dissolve forests and oceans, great faiths, nations, traditions - everything that makes a human life real - and replace it with this … Pleasure Dome?
Want. Want is the acid.
So They Try Not to Think
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
In The Machine Will Never Triumph, part 40, Farasha Euker discusses the dicotomy between our misguided belief that we should be secular individuals and the fact that we cannot even stand our own company - how are we to manage in The World alone when we dsespise ourselves so deeply and we no longer have the stability of Community to turn to when in need? Generally, we don’t, we distract ourselves from our loneliness via ‘entertainment’ and drugs. The picture Euker paints reminds me of Brave New World:
Moderns view the past as being repressive and full of laws, and our era as being free. However, the truth is that it is we who are more bound by regulations, and the people of the past were freer. Earlier times may have had more cultural and religious norms, but they were often not codified, and they tended to be based on natural law and common sense. Even passports didn’t exist until after the First World War. Now, on the other hand, society is full of so many systems, and those systems need laws and rules to function, so we live—but tied into straightjackets. With ever present surveillance, and complete lack of privacy, one wrong move may ruin one’s life. One is no longer even free to share opinions in case they may be viewed as politically incorrect. The only freedoms modern people are allowed are the freedoms to waste life, waste time, and destroy their minds with drugs. It is time to move back to simpler, freer times.
One of the great joys of life until approximately one hundred years ago was the joy of silence, peace, and being alone. Everyone needs these moments of retreat from others and the world. Some, such as monks, would live their entire lives in such a state. Now, we feel we need radio, television, and other distractions. Modern people don’t believe in a God, nor the soul, nor the afterlife, so they feel extremely depressed at any moment they have time to ponder the nature of life, so they choose not to think, and they drug themselves into a stupor through the use of entertainment and drugs. This may prevent them from committing suicide, but it cuts off the last remaining connections to the cosmos from an already uprooted person, leading to a deadness of the soul. And what of the men and women who do retain roots and who strive to re-establish connections to the world? It will be a difficult time, since there is really nowhere left in the world with complete peace, and the last remaining refuges of peace are being ground to dust by the Machine.
Being along is such a joy precisely because one who is in touch with things is never alone. Even that tree on a hill is connected to the earth, the sun, water, and various small creatures. The only man who is truly alone is the man who severs his connections and drowns his life in noise.
What Can Transform The Lonely Masses?
“To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts - not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality.” - Rudolf Steiner
Mattias Desmet, in his article Digital Depression and Lonely Masses, also explores the consequenses of secular individualism in light of mass formation. When we are isolated form others we no longer have perspective around issues within society and we no longer have empathy - the ability to put ourselves in other’s shoes, because we no longer understand The Other as we have been so segregated from them via our online, solitary lives. The segregation from other people creates a sense of ‘freefloating’ anxiety or generalized fear - fear of The Other, fear of the unknown, fear of possibilities, fear of acceptance, fear of rejection, fear of ourselves…fear of knowing ourselves:
“False security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.
Loneliness and atomization is not just a problem, it is a problem with enormous social consequence. Isolated, atomized subjects tend, especially under the influence of media and social media narratives, to suddenly coalesce into a new kind of group: a mass. This kind of group formation makes people radically incapable of thinking critically about the stories presented to them, willing to radically sacrifice everything they hold dear, and deeply intolerant of any voice that deviates of what the masses believe in.
The masses of yesteryear (i.e. the crusades, the witch hunts, etc.) were physical masses – the masses consisted of a group of people physically coming together. The current masses, on the other hand, consist of individuals who, each in digital solitude, are infused by the mass media with similar representations and stories. It is this lonely mass that, together with its leaders, forms the backbone of the ultimate symptom of our rationalistic society: the totalitarian state. The big question we have to answer as a culture is therefore this: what can transform the lonely masses into a society in the true sense of the word – a group of people connected from person to person; where the collective does not destroy the individual, but guarantees a space in which it can flourish as a singular being.”
How do we encourage both strong Individuals within stable Communities? How does Society support one’s individuality within the collective?
Well, it is not through recreating social life online, although this is exactly what we have done. Our desire to be part of a collective is expressed in our pull toward social media. As I pointed out in my first essay:
“The human world could also be called The Machine. I am wondering if when humans create the world around us via technologies, as we have throughout history, we are actually creating a false idol. When we create the ‘World’ (the Machine) to usurp the Earth we are actually creating a whole false idol to live inside, like the matrix.”
We have abandoned face-to-face, intimate and, sometimes, uncomfortable interaction between people for the cold, impersonal, remote interactions of the digital world. As Desmet points out, we have lost Ourselves (our Essence) in the Digital World; we have lost our tether to Community in the process - that which anchors us to Reality.
Love - the Death of The Individual
“Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled - thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty.” - Rudolf Steiner
The above quote is from the early 1900’s. Steiner was speaking even back then about what he called ‘Inner Development’ as learning to love others through practiced empathy and understanding (he developed daily practices to achieve this which you can explore here). We generally think of love as an unconditional idea, something given to another, but somehow non-binding, somehow separate to our Self.
Farasha Euker in The Machine Will Never Triumph, part 42, gives her thoughts on the destruction of love via The Individual:
The modern state was originally based on the twin pillars of Roman law and a terribly distorted vision of Christianity, though modernity has now infected the entire globe. Added on top of that foundation are capitalism and democracy. All of these ingredients emphasize the individual, and the need to love, yet the irony is an individual cannot love and stay an individual. A society truly based on love could never be a democracy and could never be capitalist….
And when love dies, the Machine is born.
Euker points to D.H. Lawrence’s writings around love and individualism:
To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long run fatal….To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be “free” and individual. So that we see, what our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love. The individual cannot love: let that be an axiom. And the modern man or woman cannot conceive of himself, herself, save as an individual. And the individual in man or woman is bound to kill, at last, the lover in himself, or herself. It is not that each man kills the thing he loves, but that each man, by insisting on his own individuality, kills the lover in himself, as the woman kills the lover in herself.
In truely loving another - when we are able to see the humanity in another person, we enter into the state of Interbeing where all phenomena are interdependent. In this state of being, in this form, everything is connected, interconnected, we are all One.
This brings us to an interesting juxtaposition where the Individual and the Other, or rather all Others, go from being autonomous and independent to being One, a Collective, a Community. And this occurs via love - we cannot love another and stay an Individual, we can only love as interconnected beings…Interbeing.
This is the ‘human fellowship’ Steiner is refering to in his quote above. “Learning to live together and understand one another” comes from our ability to love and enter into a state of Interbeing.
Substack has just let me know that this essay is getting too long, so I will need, unfortunately, to continue on with a Part 3. G.K. Chesterton, Ivan Illach, Paul Kingsnorth, Peco from Pilgrims in The Machine, Wendell Berry and more will feature there; but first, let me sum up Part 2.
In a boundless, limitless society everything become relative. Definitions no longer mean anything as you can define ideas/words however you like. This leads us to revere The Individual and Individualism as the end-all, be-all. The focus of our culture becomes the wants and desires of each ego. Individualism is driven harder and further in the culture via constant change, through manipulated desire and envy - the ‘need’ for more. More which never satisfies and drives us to consume. We consume and consume to fill the void inside us, the void which we cannot escape. The void is the lack of connection to others - the lack of Community, the lack of love, the lack of Interbeing.
In order to be whole we must be capable of thinking our own thoughts, “generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality”, while being held within the safety of our Community and set within the limits of innate moral structure - synderesis, The Law of Human Nature. Part 3 will explore further how to find this balance.